This area of western Ontario has produced 28 million ounces of gold from ore averaging 15 g/t gold. That is a huge amount of very high-grade gold.

All those Red Lake gold deposits share certain traits. Gold generally occurs at mafic-felsic boundaries within the Red Lake Greenstone Belt or where greenstone rocks butt up against sedimentary rocks. It helps when rocks have been stretched and folded to create openings that can fill with gold.

So if you are looking for more Red Lake gold, you start where the right kinds of structures run through the right rock types and boundaries.

Great Bear Resources’ (TSXV: GBR) Dixie Lake project offers exactly that combination of traits. It also offers historic gold drill hits in a land package where divided ownership kept explorers at bay for years. Those were the first things that attracted me to the investment.

Then I learned that Great Bear has a tight share structure and strong management. And that the company had already spent 18 months diving through historic data, reinterpreting geology, and confirming their ideas through initial drilling. They also cleaned up project ownership, cleared away old royalties, and expanded the property.

The initial drill program was a clear success. Dixie Lake returned high-grade gold from 500 metres of strike and to 100 metres depth. And the gold was very consistent – in a district where nugget-y gold means drilling often misses as often as it hits, Dixie Lake returned better than 3 g/t gold in 70 of 73 holes, including lots of very high-grade hits.

That’s a good start – but what’s exciting is the potential for much more.

Great Bear will test four exploration targets at Dixie Lake in a drill program that just got underway. The team is going to look below the known zone; gold often gets better with depth in Red Lake. It’s going to look 2 km along strike to the northwest, where the team has found gold in the same structures and rocks. It’s going to look to the southeast where the gold-bearing structure folds back on itself, the kind of hinge that often carries globs of gold in Red Lake. And it’s going to look beyond the hinge for another entire limb of mineralization to the south.

I named Great Bear a Top Pick for 2018 based on all this: the company’s people, its tight corporate structure, and the strong exploration potential at Dixie Lake.
Then an almost bonus factor appeared.

Great Bear has a second project. West Madsen is only 20 km from Dixie Lake and offers similar potential, but has seen much less work. Great Bear planned to slowly get active at West Madsen…but now another explorer has discovered high-grade gold less than two kilometres away, on a structure that clearly continues right across the property line.

In its first drill program at this new discovery, Pure Gold Mining (TSXV: PGM) intersected near surface gold in multiple targets and has already defined high-grade mineralization over more than 800 metres of strike. The best grades came at the southwest end of that strike, with hits like 33.3 g/t gold over 8.3 metres and 24.2 g/t gold over 1 metre. The structure showed good continuity, especially for a first pass drill test, with hits 500 metres to the north returning 21.3 g/t gold over 10 metres, 10.7 g/t gold over 4.2 metres, and 25 g/t gold over 2 metres.

Wedge is an exciting and impressive new discovery. Pure Gold hasn’t stopped drilling there since discovery and another set of results are imminent. It’s likely some of the pending holes step even closer to Great Bear’s ground, given that Wedge returned its best hits from the southwest end of its strike.

I don’t know what Pure Gold will report next, but odds of success are fairly high given that they’re now working to expand a discovery that’s already in the books. And the closer they step to Great Bear’s boundary, the more interest investors will have in the neighbouring company.

It means Great Bear’s background project is now also attracting attention. And deservedly so: the neighbouring Madsen project hosts an historic high-grade mine and current owner Pure Gold is having great success finding more. The new gold discovery is just 1.6 km from GBR’s ground and the zone could well continue right across the property line, right to where historic work returned gold at West Madsen.

Strong results and targets at one project, where drills just started turning.

A new discovery just across the property line and right along structure at another property, where fieldwork is imminent.

A technical team with deep Red Lake expertise.

A clean company with a tight share structure and a pre-discovery valuation.

And all in a district where discoveries have been turning into mines for decades.

Exploration is risky but success is very rewarding. With so many factors aligned in its favor, I see GBR as a standout stock poised to perform in 2018.

Note: There is much more to this story. For my in-depth report on Great Bear Resources, covering everything there is to know about the Dixie Lake and Madsen Wet projects and plans, CLICK HERE